Town boss Kieran McKenna felt there were positives to be taken from his side’s 4-3 defeat at Brentford, particularly the first-half display, despite the “extreme disappointment” and “devastation” of falling to such a late loss to the Bees.
Bryan Mbeumo’s goal six minutes into injury time claimed all three points for the home side at the Gtech Community Stadium.
"It was an incredible game,” McKenna said. "It’s obviously a mixture of great pride in the performance on an individual level, on a team level.
"The quality, the resilience that we’ve shown through a really challenging week led to so many good things in the performance, and three goals away from home and could have had a couple more.
"But, of course, it’s extreme disappointment, devastation about the late goal that means that we don’t get any points for our efforts.
"Look, we always try and take the positives and I think we showed so many things today that were on the right track, that, to be honest, were back on the right track for us.
"We showed a real identity as a team from a mental point of view and from a tactical point of view and, although we didn’t get any points to show for it, I think it was a real step in the right direction, that if we show those things on a consistent basis, we’ll be competitive in the majority of games and we’ll have a chance to pick up points.”
Regarding the game’s key incidents, Brentford’s penalty and the decision to send off Harry Clarke for a second bookable offence, he added: "I really don’t want to talk about the decisions, to be honest. I talked about them last week. I think it’s another marginal decision that VAR gets in the middle of.
"I could say that I think the contact started outside, somebody else could say the contact continued inside. I could say that the player’s probably going down from the first contact, but I think it would take away from an outstanding game and I can only trust that we’ll get our balance of decisions over the season.”
Regarding the red card, he added: "I’ve not seen that one back, so I don’t know if he’s got a touch on the ball or not.
"I think if he hasn’t got a touch on the ball, there probably can’t be too many complaints. If he has got a touch on the ball, it’s probably not a yellow card. It looked pretty close at the time.
"Again, our focus needs to be on that we need to defend both situations better in the first place.”
Quizzed on how Clarke, who was making his first Premier League start, might bounce back, McKenna said: "I’ve not spoken to him after. It’s his Premier League debut and he’s not started a game since April.
"He’ll get plenty of support from us. He did some good things in the game, there were some good things in his performance but there were a few things, of course, a few defensive moments, that he’ll want to do better on and he’ll be disappointed with.
"But he’s a young player, making his Premier League debut coming back from a very big injury and because of injuries we have, we’ve had to throw him pretty much into the team, where ideally he’ll have had a longer period of maybe coming off the bench.
"Like all of our players and our culture, he’ll take his mistake on the chin, I’m sure, and look to learn from it, work harder and work hard on those things in training and come back again strong.”
The Blues boss praised his other full Premier League debutant, George Hirst, who scored a goal and picked up an assist, having come into the side for Liam Delap: "I thought he was outstanding against two physically really dominant centre-halves.
"From where he’s come from in the last couple of years, to perform like that on his Premier League debut, give exactly what we needed in the team today, showed exactly what he can bring to the table and also showed great composure with his finish.
"I thought it was an incredible effort, even more so as it was his debut and his first start since pre-season and his first competitive start since May.
"Of course, Liam’s had a good start to the season and is doing some good things. So, he’s a really important player for us.
"But George has been training really well. We thought his qualities would be really important today in the type of game it was going to be against a team who press man-to-man, a team who are really good on set plays and we thought George’s qualities would be really important for us.
"We know Liam’s doing well but he’s also in his first season in the Premier League, of course, but it’s also his first season starting every week as a number nine in essence, so he’s not going to start every single game and play every single minute, and that’s where you need a squad and I thought George did himself proud and did the team proud.”
McKenna was asked whether he felt Sammie Szmodics’s effort which was saved by Mark Flekken at 2-0 was a turning point.
"It was a big moment, there’s no doubt about it,” he said. "Two-nil up away from home is never a safe result. Of course, we didn’t want the goals to come as quickly as they did, but 2-0 up away from home, especially against Brentford, who can attack in waves when they’ve got momentum, is never a safe result. Three-nil is a lot harder to come back from.
"It was a big moment, but it was a good save from the keeper, a really well executed press from us and a good save from the keeper and it is what it is. Sammie took his first goal absolutely brilliantly, but it was probably a big moment in the game.”
The Town boss’s half-time team-talk changed dramatically over two minutes just before the break with the Bees quickly going from 2-0 down to 2-2.
"We’ve said it plenty of times, but that’s the level, and we need to improve,” he said. "We were so good for so much of the first half in our organisation, we limited Brentford so little and they’ve created so many chances at home and we limited them to so little in the first half, but it was probably the first couple of moments where we just dropped our intensity a little bit.
"We were one or two yards off in our individual actions and they carved through the pitch really, really well and executed brilliantly and our recovery runs after they broke the initial pressure weren’t good enough, and we end up just being half a yard away from being there to make the interception at the end.
"Those half-a-yards and those differences in the margins, that’s what we have to keep working at.”
He says it doesn’t shock him that games at this level can change so quickly: "You’re not surprise, it’s the Premier League, it’s a massive step. They’ve got experienced and quality players, and I’ve seen it lots of times, you don’t have to get too much wrong for the opposition to score.
"It’s half a yard, probably both goals, if you go through them, we’re probably a yard off in four or five different circumstances right up to the moment where the forward strikes the ball and we’re a couple of inches off.
"You don’t have to get a whole lot wrong for the other team to score. Two really well executed moves from them, the second right on the brink of offside, but not offside, that’s how good their execution was.
"So you’re not surprised. Of course, it would have been great to get to half-time at 2-0 but you know at 2-0 the game’s not done, so we tried to be positive with it and at half-time the mindset was about trying to get a result from the second half and trying to look at it from the perspective that it was better that the goals came at that stage rather than maybe in the 70th minute where you don’t have time to have a breather and regroup.
"We did regroup really well. I thought we started the second half well, but it was a very tight call on the penalty, but not a good enough bit of defending from us that gives the opposition the lead.”
Town did, however, prevent Brentford from maintaining their record of goals within the opening seconds.
"It was an important part of the preparation,” McKenna continued. "I think when you watch the last three or four games, probably every team’s prepared for that scenario but they still execute really, really well.
"I don’t think there’s anything complicated to it. Like a lot of the things they do well, they just execute basics really, really well.
"The goals have tended to come from playing the ball forward to a high full-back, fighting for the first header, being really aggressive on the second ball.
"Probably the most common mistake teams against them have made is getting caught on that second ball and trying to complete passes in the first couple of seconds in a game inside their counter-press and they’ve counter-pressed the second ball really well, put it wide and got the ball in the box and they’ve got bodies in the box and they’ve started with an incredible intensity.
"We prepared for that part of the game. To be honest, they changed their set-up a little bit today and they weren’t quite as direct in the opening seconds, so maybe that was because we covered it off well and maybe that’s because teams are starting to account for that.
"You’d have to ask Thomas [Frank] that but it’s certainly admirable what they’ve been doing at the start of games.”
Was he surprised the first kick was a back-pass to the keeper? "No, I think it’s always a back-pass to the goalkeeper, it usually goes direct from the goalkeeper or from the middle centre-back.
"But today I think we were really well set-up to deal with that and they probably played a few more short passes from there.”
Meanwhile, McKenna slammed claims by Football Insider that Town are looking to cut Kalvin Phillips’s loan short in January due to his lack of fitness and poor physical condition.
"What can I say about that?” McKenna said. "Proper nonsense, and I learned quite a while ago in football that you can write something online and it circulates and gets picked up by a lot of different media outlets and then it becomes a story.
"It’s absolute nonsense, there’s been no conversations of the like and I think it’s a real shame. He had a very good game today.”